If You Want to Remove the Rich from Power, and You Live Where English is Spoken, Here Is What YOU Should Do. Really!

I am as serious as a heart attack now

The way to remove the rich from power is to build a movement that has that explicit goal right from the beginning. What I say below that you should do is a way—a REALISTIC way—to build exactly that kind of movement. Here is what you should do.¹ This is not grandiose rhetoric; it’s nuts and bolts practical stuff to do.

Go online to find a company that makes buttons and stickers, etc. (I used https://www.printrunner.com/ and for 1000 stickers the cost was a bit less than 8 cents per sticker.)

Provide them this PDF file² and ask them to create some stickers with its image. The image is this:

Also use this same PDF file to print the same image as large as can fit on a 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper.³ Then take it somewhere (a UPS store in the United States will work) and have it laminated.

Then use some string and two little metal clips so that you can hang this image from your neck so that the image is in front of your belly (low enough so that people can look at it without risking having eye-to-eye contact with you, which will come later.)

Here’s what it looks like. (A passer-by kindly took this photo of me and emailed it to me, with his attempt to add a heart to it):

Stand, with your sign and a bunch of stickers to hand out, in a public place where you live where people pass by.⁴ I stand in front of the entrance to the CVS drug store in my neighborhood of Brighton, MA (postal zip code 02135.) You may need to find a place on public property so nobody can order you to leave their private property. If you work week days, then do this on Saturdays. I suggest doing it always at the same place, so you get to know people who shop there regularly, and so that eventually lots of people in that area discover that other people whom they know also took a sticker and loved it. This is important. I generally do “sticker-ing” for two hours on any given day.

When somebody approaches, say something like “Hi there” to attract their attention to your sign. Lots of people will smile when they see the sign. Trust me, this is true! You will see it for yourself. Offer them a sticker and say something like, “You’ll love the website at the bottom of this sticker!” (By saying those words you will inform them that a) it is a sticker and b) you’re encouraging people to visit a website whose URL is at the bottom of the sticker. And it’s true, they will in fact love the website because they smiled when they saw your sign.)

Here’s what you will discover.

• Most people LOVE your sign! (I mean around 90% of the people who read the sign love it. Over and over again when I do this I see people who intend to walk by me and ignore me glance at the sign and then stop, smile, and ask for a sticker. It’s the sign, and ONLY the sign, that makes them do this!) Every activist who told you that most people are brainwashed into supporting the system, and that people just want to keep the rich in power because they expect and hope to be rich one day themselves, and bla bla bla, does not know what he or she is talking about. Such activists are themselves brainwashed by ruling class propaganda as I discuss here. You will see this is so, with your own eyes; you won’t have to take my word for it.

• Hardly anybody says they disagree with your sign. Out of hundreds who love it (many say “I agree with that” or “Yes! Perfect” or such words, or just really smile when they see the sign) maybe one person in a hundred will say something negative about it. Such people are RARE. They come in three types. One type is the person who says something like, “Well, the rich people provide us jobs.” This type of person is not so much hostile as confused. Anther type is the person who says something like, “The rich are smarter than other people and so they deserve to be rich” or “I’m going to be rich and want the rich in power.” This type of person is hostile and is an asshole. Ignore them! Don’t waste your precious time arguing with them. A third type is the person who angrily says, “You’re a Communist!” Such people are typically people who once lived in the Soviet Union or a Communist nation and (understandably!) mistrust anybody who talks about equality. I tell such people—truthfully!—that I am an Anti-Communist and an Anti-Marxist and an Anti-Socialist because I am for real, not fake, democracy. But ALL of these kinds of people are RARE. That’s what you will discover.

• Yes, lots of people walk by you and ignore you. They ignore you because they happen at that moment to be focused on something important in their life and are not interested in engaging with some stranger doing who-knows-what? I myself often feel this way when I am entering a store. You too, I bet. Right? There is no political significance to the fact that lots of people ignore you. The reason they ignore you has nothing whatsoever to do with their reaction to your sign because they don’t even read your sign.⁵

Do this too.

When you hand a sticker to somebody who wants one, say, “Would you like another one to show to a friend?” Many people will say, “Yes.” Offer them four or five and let them take the number they wish. NOTE! People who take extra stickers to “show to a friend” (or relative or co-worker, etc.) are, by doing that, engaging in egalitarian revolutionary ACTIVISM. It is not organized activism, but it is activism nonetheless.

Such activism (“baby step activism” I call it) is what people do before they decide to do organized activism. When people discover that their friends (and relatives and co-workers and neighbors) ALSO love the sticker, they become more confident that most people want an egalitarian revolution. This confidence, and ONLY this confidence, is what causes people to engage in organized egalitarian revolutionary activism.⁶ One form such activism can take⁷ is for people in a reform struggle or reform organization of any kind to tell the public that they also want to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor (as I discuss here.)

You will get in great conversations with some people. They will typically ask why you are doing this. Explain that you are doing it for this reason. To help people learn, as the website PDRBoston.org shows, that in wanting to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor they are the vast majority and not the tiny hopelessly weak minority that the rich try to make us think we are. The rich try to hide this truth by censoring any expression of what the sticker calls for in all the mass and ‘alternative’ media. The rich do this so we will think hardly anybody else wants to remove the rich from power and so we will think it is impossible to remove the rich from power. The rich want us to feels too hopeless even to try to remove the rich from power. But, when most people KNOW they are the vast majority in wanting to remove the rich from power, then everything will change.

Read this footnote about keeping in touch with people who like the sticker.⁸

If you do this…

If you do this you will be doing something that is EASY and SAFE and LEGAL and FUN (Yes, it really is fun!!) to do, and which is also an EXTREMELY APPROPRIATE thing to do to persuade people to build a real egalitarian revolutionary movement. It will also change—for the much better and the much more realistic—how you view the people in your neighborhood. I guarantee it! You will gain real confidence that you are literally surrounded by people who would LOVE an egalitarian revolution (but who currently think that is impossible).

Doing this is a “baby step” in implementing the strategy I discuss here.

If you don’t do this…

If you don’t do this (or its equivalent) then why not? Do you prefer instead to just bemoan the fact that the rich are in power and treat us all like dirt? Do you want to justify not doing what it takes to build a movement that can one day remove the rich from power, on the grounds that most people suck? The ruling class (with help from the Left) works very hard to make you feel that way. Will you let them succeed?

Your call

1. This is the best way I have been able to come up with. If you have a better way, then go for it! (And please tell me what it is.)

2. See the next footnote for how to make it a file on your computer.

3. On an iMac I use my browser to go to the PDF’s URL: https://newdemocracyworld.org/button.pdf . Then I download the file (click File at the top of your screen and then select ‘Save’ to a filename such as, say, sticker.pdf .) Then I open the file with the Preview app. (that comes with any iMac.) In that app I click on the magnifying glass that has a plus sign in it, at the very top of the iMac screen, until the image fills the space of the page. Then I print it. I’m pretty sure you can do the equivalent on a different brand of computer. Call technical support and they will tell you how.

4. I’m assuming you live in a place where most people are working class (a.k.a. working class or middle class) and are not rich CEOs and billionaires, right?

5. Sometimes a person will walk by and say “I’m all set” or “I’m OK” as a way of declining the offer of a sticker. I reply with “I’m all set too!” or “I’m OK too!” I do this because it makes me feel good to do it, I confess. But it’s a friendly remark and invariably it elicits a smile in response, I guess partly because it’s so unexpected, but also because it affirms that we’re really the same (as the word “too” emphasizes) and not different kinds of people.

6. One day two young women who worked in the Chase bank branch office next to the CVS drug store where I was “sticker-ing” took stickers. The next day they came with a red apple and a bottle of cold water to give me, in appreciation for what I was doing and told me their names. This is not un-common. I’ve received unsolicited money from others (which I gladly accept and say it helps pay for the stickers), and even a candy bar. The following day a woman came to me who also worked in the bank and asked for a sticker, saying “My girls told me about you” and asked me if I needed a bottle of cold water (it was a hot day.) I guess she was the supervisor of the first two women. And the next day after that a man came from the bank and asked for a sticker (all friendly and smiling) and said he heard about me from other employees at the bank. This is how egalitarian revolutionary organizing looks when it is just starting. Baby steps.

7. I have discovered that it is extremely difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to persuade people who are already anti-establishment activists of one sort or another to do egalitarian revolutionary activism. Such people, more so than non-activists, tend to have anti-working-class ideas that they firmly hold and that prevent them from doing what I propose here. Fortunately in this regard, such activists are a very tiny percentage of working class people generally. For the vast majority of working class people who are not activists, the obstacle to their becoming organized egalitarian revolutionary activists is hopelessness based on thinking too few other people want an egalitarian revolution; the obstacle for these people is not particularly anti-working-class ideas that they firmly hold. This is why it is more important to talk to random people “on the street” than to activists on zoom calls, etc.

8. My website at the very top currently says, “Email me at spritzler@comcast.net if you like my website and would like to converse with me.” I will edit this to make it clear to anybody who got a sticker that I will forward their email to the person who gave them the sticker, based on the location where they got it. Or you can create your own egalitarian revolutionary website and have its URL on your sticker and sign. Your website could if you wish have a link to mine.

By the way, I have learned from past experience years ago that it’s a waste of time to ask people for their contact information and then to phone or email them to persuade them to do something. Usually the contact information is false, or “they’re not home” when you call, and so forth. When people want to get involved, they will contact me (or you) as long as they have a way of doing that, which the website gives them.